


Love is Natural and Real (But Not for Such As You and I)

by neverfaraway



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Fix-It, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Repression, Somebody Give Richie Tozier A Hug, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:54:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23754193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfaraway/pseuds/neverfaraway
Summary: Five times the words on Richie’s skin meant nothing to him, and the time they finally did.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 132





	Love is Natural and Real (But Not for Such As You and I)

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here I am, back on my bullshit again. Technically, this is 6+1, because I can’t count to five. Given that I set out with no intention of writing either of these tropes, and certainly not of ticking both of them off in one go... and that I literally swore in the notes of my last Reddie fic that I was done with this pairing… I think we’re all just going have to cut each other some slack.
> 
> Find my Reddie playlist here: [Shake the Disease – a Reddie playlist](https://play.spotify.com/user/neverfaraway/playlist/3Nkhaya9IGo2VE5NAWRvRC)

“I’m sorry, Richie.”

It’s not the first time Richie’s heard it, and he assumes it won’t be the last.

The guy has the decency to look like he means it, as he picks up his jacket and slips out the door of Richie’s apartment.

It’s not like he was the love of Richie’s life, or anything. They met at an awards show and agreed to split an Uber; they fucked on Richie’s couch, and then again a week later on Richie’s bed, and then twice more in Richie’s darkened living room with the glow of the traffic signals on Clark Drive painting their skin just light enough to find each others’ bodies.

They’ve both got reasons for keeping it a secret. The guy’s not A-List, or even C-List yet, but he will be; so he tells Richie when he’s blasted on free champagne and just had his brain sucked out via his dick.

Given that he can’t even bear to fuck Richie with the lights on, it’s no great surprise when he turns up the fifth time with a bottle of wine, like it’s a consolation prize, and leaves Richie standing in his kitchen, staring at it, while Mr Up-and-Coming makes a swift exit. He’s young enough that Richie had felt vaguely like a pervert, in any case, and the kind of good-looking that wouldn’t let itself be seen in public in the company of the likes of Richie Tozier, even if either of them had been out and proud.

He gets drunk that night, drunk enough he can pretend he hasn’t got those goddamn words etched on his hip.

It wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.

* * *

He probably can’t even remember the first time he heard it. Richie’s got an uncanny ability for getting himself into situations in which people feel the need to let him down gently. 

His mom had to explain to him in second grade that it wasn’t his fault no one wanted to come to his birthday party. It was just that he was the new kid in town and he hadn’t made any friends yet, and as soon as the school year started he could have another birthday party and invite all his new friends over, just like he had last year, at the school he hadn’t wanted to leave in the first place.

“I’m sorry, Richie, honey. Your dad and I know you didn’t want to move. But as soon as you make some new friends, you’ll love it here, I promise.”

He didn’t exactly know what ‘bullshit’ meant, except he’d heard his dad say that Walter Mondale was talking bullshit on _Good Morning America_ , and last month, before they moved, his uncle Marty had shouted at the Super Bowl that a decision about a foul against the Raiders was bullshit, so in his opinion everything his mom had just said sounded exactly like bullshit.

When his words finally came in, the summer his voice broke and hair started growing in places he’d never had hair before, he’d heard them so many times already that they didn’t really seem to be of much significance. His mom had been right about his friends; the Losers were going to take over the world one day, once they all got out of this shitty town, Richie was convinced. For now, all they had to do was get through the final day of school without getting beaten up by Bowers and his gang of Neanderthals, and the summer break stretched before them, golden and empty and free. 

“Are you coming, dickwad?” Eddie demanded, tugging on his backpack. “I swear, if we end up in detention on the last day because you made us late, I will dedicate this summer to finding the most physically painful way of killing you.”

“Just get your mom to sit on me.”

“D-dude,” said Bill.

“Hey, I didn’t specify which bit of me I wanted her to sit on, ‘cause face or dick -“

“Would you shut the fuck up, and just get a fucking move on,” Eddie snapped.

“Anything for you, Eddie, my love,” Richie said, grinning, and went to class with a spring in his step, because Eddie was blushing again and trying to pretend he wasn’t by scowling fiercely at the back of Stan’s head.

* * *

Christmas of junior year, for reasons Richie isn’t entirely regretting, even with Eddie’s head between his hands over a toilet bowl in an upstairs bathroom, the Losers have ended up at some lame house party thrown by seniors not really cool enough to decree that the Losers aren’t cool enough to attend.

It’s not exactly wild; there’s booze and there’s music, but there’s also a really intense discussion about _Falsettoland_ going on between the theatre kids holed up in the dining room, and some of the D&D crowd have set themselves up in the basement with horror movies and boardgames. The Losers - what remains of them - have turned up because Bill’s dating a girl named Sarah, who’s really, really, super into chemistry and has ambitions to go to MIT, and is best friends with the host’s sister. They’ve mostly been hanging out in the corner of the living room, laughing at Richie’s attempts to chat up Sarah’s quiet friend, who’s spent most of the evening looking at him like he’s a particularly repulsive species of bacterial growth.

“Sorry, Richie,” Eddie mutters thickly, mid-heave. He’s brought up the beer and the peach schnapps and most of the pizza they ate in Bill’s garage before heading over, and he’s resting his sweaty forehead on one arm, glancing up at Richie piteously between retches. “This is so fucking disgusting.”

“More disgusting than the time I puked intact Doritos directly into Stan’s hand?” Richie asks, pushing the damp hair off Eddie’s forehead under the guise of helping him out.

Eddie’s eyes go wide and he turns away to heave into the toilet bowl, moaning in horror. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Fuck, I need to be horizontal. Richie, I can’t be upright anymore.”

“Wow, you’re so blitzed,” Richie says, with admiration. “Come on, Jim Morrison, on your feet.”

Usual practice is for Richie to be the one needing assistance halfway through an evening’s convivialities. He’s got great capacity for putting away more alcohol than he can handle, and doing it quick, within the first half-hour, after which he’s sloppy and embarrassing and has to be poured into his bed by Mike and Stan to prevent him doing something that'll get them all grounded for a month. Tonight is different. Tonight is Richie’s only opportunity to prove to his dad that he’s capable of exercising some responsibility, before Went will consider buying him a car of his own for his upcoming birthday. The promise of that car is important to him; it means freedom, and independence, and being able to drive over to Eddie’s any time he likes and lure him into coming on road trips to Portland, or Katahdin, or the beach at Moose Point. The destination isn’t really the important part.

He nudges Eddie in the direction of the bed - he suspects it’s Sarah’s friend’s mom and dad’s room, because who’s fancy enough to have more than one en-suite? - which is where everyone’s thrown their coats. It’s mid-winter in New England; the TOG rating of the combined layers of outerwear must be approaching the thousands. It looks super inviting, in Richie’s opinion, but Eddie’s moaning again, complaining that he’ll barf if the room doesn’t stop spinning, so Richie lets him slide into an ungainly heap at the foot of the bed, head back against the edge of the mattress, while he heads back to the bathroom for a glass of water. 

When he returns, Eddie’s got the end someone’s scarf over his face, his eyes closed and his mouth hanging open in an expression of such exaggerated inebriation that Richie wishes he had a camera to document this moment for posterity. 

“You’re lucky Ben broke his Polaroid,” he says, as he sets the water next to Eddie’s knee and lifts the scarf off his clammy face. He folds himself into the space next to Eddie on the floor.

“F’ck you,” Eddie mumbles. 

“That’s the spirit. Think you’re gonna be sick again?”

To Richie’s horror, Eddie’s face collapses into an expression of abject misery, and he starts to cry, fat tears welling without warning and rolling down his flushed cheeks.

“Hey, hey, Eds, what’s up?”

“I’m sorry, Richie, I ruined the party. Now you gotta look after me and make sure I don’t choke on my own puke, and I’m so fucking disgusting and my mom’s gonna freak out-“

“Hey, Eddie, baby, don’t cry; your mom thinks you’re sleeping over at Bill’s, remember?”

“Don’t call me that,” Eddie says, miserably, sounding as though he’s seconds from falling into unconsciousness. “Stop saying things like that, ‘f you don’t mean it.”

Richie’s fairly certain his brain temporarily stops working. He knows the words he heard Eddie say, can define them individually, but he can’t parse them together in any way that makes sense, because Eddie surely didn’t mean what it sounded like he was implying. 

At that moment, while Richie is in the middle of a very intense, silent argument with himself, the bedroom door opens and in stumbles a senior Richie vaguely recognises, one of the mathletes who spectacularly failed to qualify Derry High for regionals last semester.

“Fuck, sorry, Tozier,” the asshole says, laughing, stumbling out the doorway with a smiling girl under his arm. “Looks like you need some alone time with your girlfriend.”

Eddie’s passed out, thank Christ for small mercies, because he’s even more ready to throw down while drunk than he is while sober. Richie, already panicking, watches the mathlete and his date retreat, saying nothing while the bedroom door closes behind them. Eddie’s cheek is resting on his shoulder. There is a whole range of things he could do to salvage some dignity from the situation. Shout something witty and obscene; go after the mathlete and punch him in the face for the slight to his and Eddie’s masculinity. 

He knows - he’s always known, really - what his words mean. They mean that even the love of his life is going to get bored of him eventually. Or worse, that he’ll get no further than a confession before they’re letting him down gently and never speaking to him again; at least they’re not gonna be cruel about it. Eddie wouldn’t - _stop it_. 

He’s never seen Eddie’s words, though he knows that he has them, because Eddie turned up one day in ninth grade looking shifty and embarrassed and refused to speak for the rest of the week because his voice kept making inopportune swoops into ridiculous depths and cracking into squeaks beyond his control. 

“Eddie, have you finally become a man?” Richie demanded, in the middle of the hallway, while Eddie burned bright red, hissed at him to shut the fuck up and punched him hard in the arm.

“Have you got - have you got your words, too?” Eddie asked a week later, looking like he wanted the floor the swallow him, one day in the Clubhouse when it was just the two of them and they’d been lying in the comfortable peace of the hammock reading comic books and eating candy corn, even though Eddie’s mom said it’d make their teeth fall out.

“Yeah,” Richie said, surprised, eyes dancing over Eddie’s pink, down-turned face. “Wanna see?”

Eddie eyes flew to his face, his mouth open in horror. “Richie, that’s private!”

Richie’d looked at his own words so often the thought of it didn’t hold any embarrassment for him, anymore. They weren’t at all like a tattoo, which was how the book on ‘Understanding Your Body’ that his mom left on his bed when he was twelve described them. In biology class, when they’d been learning about secondary sexual characteristics, they’d just been referred to by the Latin name, like all the other parts of the reproductive system, and that really hadn’t helped him to understand what they were and why they appeared there, on the delicate skin just inside his hip bone. 

They looked like a scar, more than anything else. Like the skin’d been burned and healed over, pale and shiny and thin. Girls always said they looked like stretch marks, but Richie had no idea what they looked like, either, so that was no help.

“I’ll show you mine,” Richie said, leering at Eddie across the space of the hammock, because suddenly there was nothing he wanted more in the world than to see that delicate patch of skin on Eddie’s body, to know this new thing about him. Of course he couldn’t just fucking be cool about it, so Eddie was looking at him in absolute revulsion, his eyes even wider and his hands frozen in mid-air, like for a second he was considering whipping down his shorts, before the realisation of what Richie was asking him set in, and he started trying to kick Richie out of the hammock, telling him he was a fucking pervert and needed to be locked up. Richie had to grab his feet in their sweaty socks and crack up and tell him he was a prude, like his heart wasn’t aching a little bit inside his chest, because if he was going to show his words to anyone, he wanted it to be Eddie.

With no one conscious there to witness it, in Sarah’s friend’s mom’s bedroom, he decides to do absolutely nothing. It’s dark and it’s warm and Eddie’s drooling into his shirt, one hand tucked needily into the crook of Richie’s arm, his fingers lax and soft against Richie’s bare skin. If this is all he’s ever going to get, he’s not too proud to take it.

Three weeks later his parents announce they’re moving again, to some backwater town in Virginia. Richie tells this to Eddie like Derry isn’t the most poisonous of backwater towns, but the fact is that Richie would have stayed here until Eddie was ready to escape with him. 

They’re in the middle of an arm-wrestling contest, during which Richie knows he’s loud and obnoxious, but _so is Eddie_ , and that fact alone is blowing most of his circuits, making him act out in such an atrocious way that Bev is laughing at him for it, when Richie remembers the rest of that evening. Eddie had broken every single rule and cycled round to Richie’s house after dark, throwing gravel at his window until Richie stuck his head over the sill and fumbled for his glasses, hurrying down the stairs to let him inside. They’d sat on Richie’s bed until the sun started to creep, crimson and unwelcome, through the blinds, and Richie had said, feeling like he was drowning, “I don’t want to go to fucking _Virginia_. What if it’s like when Bev left, what if, what if,” and Eddie had wrapped his arms around him and whispered, “I’m sorry,” like it was his fault Richie’s mom and dad didn’t give a shit about what Richie wanted or his happiness or his ability to survive his senior year. 

At the table in the Jade of the Orient, Richie sits back and watches Eddie crow about his victory, the victory Richie let him win, because he’s - wow - every bit as ruled by his dick as he was when he was sixteen. His heart hurts, but it’s so good to feel anything again, so he laughs it off and lets Bev pour him more horrible tequila. 

“Here’s mud in your eye,” he says before knocking it back, and Eddie watches the rise and fall of his throat, he knows he’s not imagining it. 

He’s rescued from having to make a decision about the wisdom of inviting Eddie back to his room at the Town House by the return of the waitress bearing a bowl of fortune cookies.

* * *

It’s an overused cliché that it’s necessary to have thick skin to work in showbusiness. Richie’s actually carved a career out of avoiding putting himself out there, which sits well with his disinclination for putting himself through gratuitous rejection. He did some community radio, turned up to auditions for the soda commercials, got the gig, fell into writing for late-night comedy after one of his shitty skits at the Comedy Store got noticed by a producer, and then somehow ended up with a spot on a couple of panel shows and a writer of his own, and since then everyone’s seemed happy for him to coast along, cultivating a slacker, gross-out following amongst a demographic of mostly teenagers and single thirty-somethings living in their parents’ basements. He once got as far as filling in his SAG-AFTRA membership renewal and marking the box for the LGBT mailing list, before ripping it up into little pieces and setting fire to them in an ashtray. He told himself it was professional suicide to give anyone unnecessary reasons to shut doors in his face.

* * *

“Richie,” Eddie says, sounding like it’s taking every ounce of his remaining strength. Richie tries to shake his head, tries to tell him to save it, but he presses on, frowning: “stop fucking - fucking _shushing me_. I’m trying to tell you I’m sorry -”

“For the mom joke, or the fact you’re getting blood all over my jacket?”

“It’s a... shitty jacket,” Eddie says. His hand is clammy on Richie’s cheek; Richie realises he’s crying at the same time as he realises Eddie’s trying to wipe his tears with trembling, frigid fingers. “I’m sorry, Richie. I didn’t mean - for this -“

“Just shut up, alright,” Richie says. His hand finds Eddie’s and Eddie clasps their palms together and and clings onto him with something like desperation. It's so close to being what Richie's always wanted, and it had to happen now, when Eddie’s been so brave, and is lying here in pain while Richie’s still so fucking scared.

If he were a more courageous man, he’d press a kiss to Eddie’s uninjured cheek and say all the things that have been trying to tumble out of his mouth since he walked into the Jade of the Orient and saw Eddie’s perfect, angry face contort itself with rage in response to his terrible jokes. But he’s not, and he doesn’t. He squeezes Eddie’s cold fingers, instead.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he tells him.

Eddie’s face closes in on itself and he sags back on the rock they’ve propped him against, but Richie can hear Bill telling the clown he’s an imposter; he scrambles to his feet and tells Eddie he’ll be back for him as soon as they’ve made sure the fucking clown is dead.

* * *

If he’d had the sound of Eddie’s breath wheezing out of him transcribed on his pelvis, maybe he’d have fucking known. If he’d had his words as well as the ones that followed them: _I didn’t mean for this…_ maybe he might have had a clue. He might have recognised their import and let the others deal with the clown, while he cradled Eddie’s hand against his chest and finally choked out the things he’d been saving up since they were sixteen and drunk at Sarah Alderman’s friend’s lame party. 

_If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas_ , had been one of Went’s favourite sayings, back when Richie was perpetually in a state of apologising to his parents for his behaviour, his report card, his latest ridiculous escapade with Eddie that’d ended up with Myra Kaspbrak on the phone, haranguing Maggie for letting her delinquent son lead Eddie astray again. 

Standing in Eddie’s bedroom at the Town House with Eddie’s cases open on the bed in front of him, Richie’s got righteous, futile anger burning a hole straight through him. He’s moved through denial and he’s hard into rage, and he has no fucking idea what to do with that, because allowing any of it to the surface will spark a wildfire he doesn’t know how to put out, and he’s terrified there’ll be nothing left of him after it’s finished tearing through.

He catches sight of himself in the mirror on the inside of the open wardrobe door and barely recognises himself. He’s looking old. He's so bone-tired of everything.

“Those weren’t the words, you fucking asshole!” 

He hears himself saying it before he realises what he’s done, but seconds later Ben and Mike are bursting into the room, and there’s broken glass all over the floor, and when Richie looks down at his own hand, his knuckles are bleeding.

Bev bundles him into her own room and inspects his hand for shards of glass before wrapping it in one of her shirts.

“They weren’t the right words,” he tells her. “How was I supposed to know he was going to - they weren’t the right fucking words.”

“I know, Richie,” she says, her mouth in his hair, her arms the only thing holding him tight enough to prevent him from shattering into pieces. “I know, honey, I know.”

Later, when he’s standing under the shower because his eyes are finally dry and he feels like a wrung-out dishrag, he glances down at his own pale, fishbelly skin and wants to laugh and laugh until he’s sick. The words are gone, and all he’s left with is a blank stretch of flesh, like Eddie never even existed.

* * *

Eddie mouths gently over the words that are etched into the thin skin that stretches over Richie’s hip. 

Eddie has the same curse as him, now: matching words so generic they offer no possible clue as to where and under what circumstances he’s gonna go. They’re like all the other schmucks in the world who got platitudes or single trivial utterances, not like the unlucky few who get something real specific - “Watch out for that tiger!” - and spend their whole lives waiting to hear it.

Richie doesn’t know when his new words appeared. Eddie’s are at the junction of his hip, at the point where his blood throbs languidly just below the surface. When Richie lays his thumb there he can feel it pulsing.

The first thing Eddie told him was what the words had said the first time round: _don’t go anywhere_. When Eddie had told him that, Richie had pressed his face into Eddie’s stomach and sobbed, hands like claws on the back of his shirt.

Neither of them could explain what had happened. Personally, Richie didn’t fucking care, and he’d told Mike so in as many words when he’d rung to question Eddie and fret about whether it meant the clown was really dead, after all. It wasn’t the how that was important, beyond the fact the police department had fished Eddie barely breathing from the pool of small, rotting bodies they found when they bothered to investigate the outlet at the very end of the sewers. They’d shipped Eddie off to the hospital in Bangor and told themselves it was a very good thing Henry Bowers had ended up with an axe in his head in the reading room at the old Town Library. 

All Richie really remembers is Bev’s choked voice at the other end of the phone: _they found him, Richie. Eddie’s alive_. He’d hung up before she’d got much further, halfway through _I’m sorry_ and _we should have listened to you._ When Eddie had woken up, he’d thrown up immediately and muttered something about turtles and Richie had promptly burst into tears.

Eddie likes kissing this part of him. He gets embarrassed and defensive if Richie ever draws attention to it, but in the warm, quiet moments when they’re worn out and lazy, he loves to run his fingers over the shape of the letters, back and forth, like he’s amazed by them, trying to convince himself they’re real. Sometimes, if he’s really blissed out and tactile, he’ll spend whole minutes tracing the faint, pale outline of them with his tongue, until Richie has to haul him up the length of his body and repeat them to his face: _I love you._

They’re two sides of the same coin, his mother always said so, from that first year they made friends and Eddie, Bill and Stanley used to come over for play dates, the four of them racing their bikes up and down the street outside Richie’s house. He’d always scoffed at that idea, because everyone knew Bill was Eddie’s best friend, just like Stan was Richie’s, until they were in seventh grade and suddenly it wasn’t true anymore. Somehow they’d become Richie’n’Eddie, and from that point on Eddie never bought an ice cream for anybody else. 

Now they’re the wrong side of forty, Richie’s stubble’s starting to grow in grey, Eddie’s divorce is about to go through, and they have this matching legend etched into their skin. Richie doesn’t think, anymore, about what it really means, and who’ll be the first to go; the fact that it’s there at all, and that Eddie finally let him get close enough to see, is enough.


End file.
